Rosemarie Trockel beyond the slogan

The work of the German artist Rosemarie Trockel is not easy to pigeonhole. Conceptual, postmodernist, feminist: none of those terms is adequate to describe her multifaceted oeuvre. It is actually that hybrid and intangible quality that she is out to achieve. As can be seen yet again in “Flagrant Delight”, the fine exhibition that Wiels is currently devoting to her.

Artists are often reduced to their best-known or most iconic work. In the case of Rosemarie Trockel (born in Schwerte in 1952) that means her woven Playboy motifs and cooking rings hung on the wall as minimalist sculptures. In both cases Trockel makes use of material associated with the world of women in order to offer a commentary on phallocentrism. Both the knitting and the cooking rings are to be seen at Wiels. But what makes the exhibition worthwhile is that that kind of readymade reading of her work is broadened out to encompass a body of work that is much more varied than those almost slogan-like works would lead one to suspect.
Trockel’s oeuvre is intentionally hybrid and involves a great diversity of media. Thus the exhibition begins – although a deliberate choice has been made not to have a beginning or an end, never mind a chronological sequence – with a group of forty collages. Strikingly, these make an almost spatial, sculptural impression, partly due to the fact that the works in question are framed and the frame is often an integral part of the work. In her collages Trockel combines photographs with text, drawings, painted images, newsprint, and a considerable number of items of clothing. In a number of cases, moreover, she sticks replicas of eyes or a nose onto the works. The collages are hard to grasp and radiate an ominous, defiant atmosphere. They function not so much as the usual preparatory studies, but rather as a reflection on earlier works. Gossip, for example, consists of a reproduction of Courbet’s L’origine du monde – an 1866 painting, frequently evoked by Trockel, that presents a full-frontal portrayal of a vagina – onto which the upper body of the artist Raymond Pettibon has been stuck, with in the background a design for a public-space commission. The collage expresses a feminist outlook on being an artist, combined with an intensive formal investigation that also refers to the legacy of Dadaism and surrealism.

Butterflies and the world of menThere is a recurrent tension in Trockel’s work between the rational/analytical and the subjective/subconscious. One could say, schematically, that this is about the contradiction between the male and the female. That recurrent tension is also reflected in her choice of materials, as can be seen, for example, in her assemblage sculptures. In one of those works she hangs a pair of neckties on a minimalist, cube-like form in steel, thereby playing with the contrast between the bleak industrial material and the colourful textile. Both materials also evoke the world of men, with the tie functioning as a phallic symbol. A butterfly is pinned to one of the ties – a symbol of the male urge to conquer? The other works also involve fascinating choices of material. An austere white cube and rectangle, for example, is made of foam rubber, a material one would not usually expect to see in minimalist art. Trockel often works with ceramics, which in her work are associated with domestic chores and the world of women; she maintains a tension between the fragility and the solidity of the material. That traditional “feminine” is also to be seen in her mechanically executed wool paintings, which play with the opposition between the manual and the mechanical.
Trockel’s diverse oeuvre is disconcerting. She constantly changes style and technique, but her work is never arbitrary: the material is always deployed in a thematically relevant way. With her deliberately quirky work she succeeds in creating an uncomfortable atmosphere, working with associative connections and underlying psychoanalytical meanings. Rather than using facile antitheses as a gimmick, her work fascinates by its formal searching and its surprising choices of material.

Rosemarie Trockel (1952, Schwerte, Germany) is held to be one of the most important international artists of our times. Museion in Bolzano is hosting her Flagrant Delight exhibition, bringing together more than 80 of her works, including textile paintings, a kitchen hob, ceramics, sculptures and collages. The works address many issues, using many techniques, but always with a precise, poetic and explicitly feminine touch. As the title suggests, her works are often playful and mysterious: whether direct and political, or openly sensual, all are open to a multiple interpretations. The exhibition is curated by Dirk Snauwaert and a special presentation will be held by Muesion’s director Letizia Ragaglia (check this interview we had with her) and Rosemary Trockel.

Rosemarie Trockel

A Cosmos

13.02.13 – 07.04.13

Serpentine Gallery / London / England

A Cosmos / Reviewed by Naomi Itami / 06.04.13

Rosemarie Trockel’s retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery is a dense, complex affair but ultimately succeeds in illuminating the practice of one of the most original and provocative artists working today. From the ancient Greek word for “order”, Trockel’s cosmos is very much her own as she curates and appropriates often un-known artists’ works, placing them in dialogue with her own. A Cosmos is both democratic and generous, and very much lateral as opposed to hierarchical in its rigorous conceptual premise of inclusivity. It also puts paid to the recent Der Spiegel interview with painter Georg Baselitz. His dismissal of women artists in general and Trockel’s work in specific as “having a lot of sympathy” 1(lacking the destructive impulse that begets originality), shows him as outmoded and insecure.

Where Trockel is ‘destructive’ is in her approach to taxonomy and her steadfast refusal to accept previously established museological hierarchies and classifications. Working across multiple media (painting, photography, drawing, video, textiles, ceramic sculpture and installation), divisions between craft and art, the trained and untrained, and most pertinently, between the natural and the man-made, dissolve and become obsolete. Reminiscent of early Wunderkammern, the first ‘wonder-room’ is its “epicentre”2: white-tiled with an upside-down palm tree suspended from the ceiling and adjacent to an aviary with taxidermied birds ‘dancing’ to a recording of their own song. Human-kind’s impact on nature becomes obvious when viewed next to Replace Me, an altered digital print of Courbet’s L’origine du Monde with a large tarantula replacing the pubis, bringing into focus Trockel’s feminist concerns surrounding androcentric ‘looking’ and zoology. Elsewhere, the wool-knitted paintings for which Trockel became famous in the 80’s are shown near ‘outsider’ artist Judith Scott’s obscure and mysterious yarn-wrapped objects, pointedly blurring distinctions between historically demoted ‘feminine’ craft and art-historically sanctioned painting. Deaf, mute and institutionalised for decades with Down’s Syndrome, Scott’s sculptures literally embody the unknown, and stand in stark, nuanced contrast to Trockel’s modernist canvases.

Park Avenue brings botany into focus. A slide series of assemblages of leaves, flowers, pods and sticks in quasi-figural poses flickering briefly upon a white cloth, it reveals an absurd anthropocentrism that shows Trockel at her ephemeral best. By placing her photograph Prime-Age (a skinhead’s ornately, botanically tattooed torso) adjacent to Maria Sibylla Merian’s delicate botanical watercolours from the 1700’s, Trockel highlights an alliance that spans centuries, gender and class, and points to a mutual human interest in botany as both biological study and decorative draughtsmanship.

Trockel chooses the medium of photography expediently when it best serves a practise whose concern is the monumental chain of experience and being that is A Cosmos. Here images and objects attest to the tangential nature of human consciousness, the deeper, unseen relationships between humans, animals and the natural world, as well as between various fields of knowledge, with none taking precedence over another. A protean and anarchic artist, Trockel’s interests lie less in her own art-making career, than in art as an open-ended, porous endeavour that inextricably links all matter physically, psychically, and ultimately politically. It is a cosmic show indeed.

In Untitled (Wollfilm) (1992), a female torso turns in a central window in a much larger and dark projection plane. With each movement, a thread, which is clearly being pulled from outside the frame, unravels another row of stitches in her woollen pullover. After a time, the background picture plane, which becomes identifiable as a stitch, begins to separate from top to bottom until the naked torso becomes one with the empty projection plane. In this video, Rosemarie Trockel calls into question important art-historical conventions and codes and models from the history of ideas and gender stereotypes with a witty formal ease and meticulous attention to detail.

Rosemarie Trockel, who was born in Schwerte, Germany, in 1952, has been producing her stylistically heterogeneous works in a wide range of media since the 1970s. Her œuvre, which has assumed an important and unique position at international level and encompasses drawings, two and three-dimensional picture and material collages, objects, installations, “knitting pictures”, ceramics, videos, furniture, pieces of clothing, and books, cannot be reduced to a single artistic genre or style; its common denominator is the intensity of its content, which incorporates an equally wide-ranging network of associations and discourses, and extends from the premises of western philosophical, theological and scientific debate and various role models and symbols to the standardisations and canonical manifestations of art. All of this content is formulated from a precise and explicitly female perspective. However, the artist also outwits feminist platitudes and leads them ad absurdum – for example, in the “hot plate” works, which she has been producing since the late 1980s and which deliver a forceful blow to the minimalist aesthetic, and with her now trademark “knitting pictures”, which present an ironic take on both the cliché of the agreeable, craft-based and mechanical form of art created by women and the traditional art-historical conventions.

However, Rosemarie Trockel’s “female” perspective extends beyond a feminist gesture. Her works are the expressions of an author who – starting with the coding of her own individuation – distances herself from systems that impose both social and sexual identity and gender-related constraints.

This is repeatedly expressed in works concerning the polar opposites of the conscious and unconscious and the culturally formed and unformed, including, for example, the numerous works she has created with and about animals: i.e. the series of animal films produced between 1978 and 1990, the models and houses developed for various animal species since the late 1980s, the project Haus für Schweine und Menschen developed with Carsten Höller for documenta X 1997 and the bronze-cast “Gewohnheitstiere”, including Gewohnheitstier 3 (Dackel) (1990), which contrast the unconcealed presentness of animals with the controlling awareness of humans. Elisabeth de Fontenay sees “anthropocentrism under house arrest” in Rosemarie Trockel’s animal works while Markus Steinweg detects the thematicisation of the relationship between “animal vivacity and human intellectuality”. Moreover, the artist’s repeated works on the theme of sleep – for example the installation for the German Pavilion for the Biennale di Venezia in 1999, her numerous drawings and works on paper, and the new series of sofa works (Watching and Sleeping and Composing, 2007) – explore the potential of sublation, or as the artist herself likes to put it in rather pompous terms, taking a sideswipe at the pronouncements of Joseph Beuys: the liquidation of the restrictive control mechanisms of the conscious.

«Verflüssigung der Mutter» is the title given by Rosemarie Trockel to her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich, which, following on from her Swiss debut at the Kunshalle Basel in 1988, an exhibition of works on paper in the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel in 1991 and a presentation of her video works at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva in 1994, provides comprehensive insight into her œuvre and features works and groups of works produced from the early 1980s on and works created specifically for the exhibition. The exhibition is presented as a well appointed sequence of spaces, in which groups of works can be experienced in an ordered minimalist form: furniture and ceramic wall works, large-format monochrome knitting pictures, collages, videos and a re-interpreted extended installation S.h.e. (2000/2005/2010), in which the entire range of media used by the artist is combined in a dynamic cabinet. This retrospective “overview show” is presented in two oversized “display cases” built into the walls of the Kunsthalle, which the artist developed as a central installation for the exhibition: the cabinets contain signature works like the knitted trademarks, egg works, felted wool monsters, for example the armchair Atheismus (2007), and exemplars from the early group of plaster objects (Hydrocephalus / Wasserkopf II, 1982). Also presented are a very wide range of “hot plate” works, for example the cardboard hot-plate record player with a knitting needle stylus (Untitled, 1991), mouth sculptures (1989), Daddy’s Striptease Room (1990), figures, body fragments and everyday objects. These refer to the “weighty” themes of the exhibition and set them in motion with lightness and ease through the interaction between the condensed “display cases” and the fluid spatial layout.

AGENDA – United Kingdom, Arts

Rosemarie Trockel

4 September – 5 October 2013 at Sprüth Magers Gallery, London.

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present an exhibition of new wool pictures and wall sculptures by Rosemarie Trockel. The artist had her first show with Monika Sprüth in 1983, in Cologne, where she still lives and works.

Rosemarie Trockel has always used a diverse range of genres and media in her work, from sculpture and drawing to collage, photography, video, and installation. She also uses a variety of materials, not least wool, with all its socially charged meanings. Her deep engagement and experiments with wool over many years have allowed Trockel to attain great freedom in her handling of the medium.

In the most recent works in wool, the material is placed like a stroke of the brush on the canvas, initiating a subtle examination of twentieth-century abstract painting. The exhibition features black monochrome pictures placed among others with vibrantly coloured stripes, creating a shifting set of colour relationships that constantly renew themselves as the viewer moves through the gallery.

A similar approach is evident in her handling of ceramic and ceramic-like material such as Acrystal, which she combines with Plexiglas in her recent sculptures. She applies casts of different cuts of meat to transparent, curved carrier panels, wittily referring to stylistic innovations of twentieth-century art yet also dislodging the material from their conventional connotations or meanings. The titles, such as “Rubbersoul” or “Marble doesn’t smile”, as well as her selective use of colour and its painterly application on unlikely surfaces, further highlight her humorous handling of paint and materials. As Roberta Smith shrewdly writes, Trockel is ‘a subversive anti-painting painter and a dedicated, non-ideological feminist.’

Rosemarie Trockel (1952) is included in “Il Palazzo Enciclopedico”, 55th Venice Biennial where in 1999 she presented her work at the German Pavilion. Parallel to the exhibition “A Cosmos” in Madrid, New York, and London (2012-2013), a solo exhibition, “Flagrant Delight”, was presented at Wiels, Brussels, Culturegest, Lisbon, and the Museion Bozen. Other recent solo exhibitions include Kunstbau im Lenbachhaus, München (2002), “Post-Menopause”, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2005) as well as MAXXI, Rome (2005), “Deliquescence of the Mother”, Kunsthalle Zürich (2010), as well as an exhibition of drawings, collages, and book designs that travelled to the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, and the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2010-2011).

Rosemarie Trockel (born in 1952 in Schwerte, Germany) has long been admired for her highly independent and influential practice. In A Cosmos she places her work in the company of others to explore varying disciplines. Central to the exhibition are a number of core works, including new works never seen before in the UK, by Trockel, and arranged around these in a constellation according to type and theme are artefacts, both natural and human.

A Cosmos reflects the artist’s interest in creating a space for ideas to exist between different disciplines, past and present. Many of the objects and artworks, selected by Trockel in dialogue with curator Lynne Cooke, produce a context for the artist’s work within other fields of inquiry, such as the natural sciences and natural history. Watercolours painted by the pioneering botanist Maria Sibylla Merian sit alongside intricate models of marine invertebrates crafted by Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, initially used as research tools by naturalists who had no access to living specimens.

Works by self-taught artists, such as Judith Scott and James Castle, are presented in parallel with films, such as Władysław Starewicz’s early, pioneering stop-motion animation of 1912, The Cameraman’s Revenge. Trockel’s appreciation of such variously under-recognised objects and artists stems from her empathy both with the questions their work addresses, and with the directness and inventiveness with which they are realised. These artists provide models of dedication to their chosen field that, for Trockel, are exemplary and inspiring.

A Cosmos traces an historical lineage from the early cabinets of curiosities (the wunderkammer) to natural history and modern art museums through to the white cube of contemporary galleries. Within this framework there is a focus on the relationship between skill and craft, and the practices of self-taught and under-recognised artists, reflecting Trockel’s ongoing tendency to overturn traditional disciplinary categories. The objects that make up this cosmos offer a wealth of resonant relationships between different fields of knowledge and experience, proposing that we remain open to new discoveries.

For more than thirty years Trockel has resisted an identifiable style, working in a variety of materials, including wool, bronze and found objects, and a range of mediums, including photography, collage, video and assemblage. The constants of her wide-ranging practice include issues that have long occupied her thinking and that have underpinned her diverse activity, such as contrasting ideas of feminism as well as the divides constructed between amateur and professional, celebrity and anonymity, and the fine and applied arts. More broadly, through her works Trockel probes not only interrelationships between humans and animals but also our impact, as a species, on the natural world.

The subject of numerous solo shows, Trockel’s works have been exhibited widely, including at New Museum, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Centre Pompidou, Paris and Whitechapel Gallery, London. Trockel represented Germany at the 1999 Venice Biennale and participated in Documenta in 1997 and 2012.

This exhibition is curated by Lynne Cooke and organised by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery.

ONE by ONE WEDNESDAYS’ is a weekly series wherein one of our Blacklist staffers selects a cultural contributor of their choice and provides an introduction to that person. These are the people who get us excited, inspire our pitches, and interrupt our days with something beautiful.Installation shot of ‘Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos’ (Via NY Times)We’re late on this again. We’re sorry. Anyway, Rosemarie Trockel is a wonderful visual artist from Germany whose popularity in the States has been something of a cult status. Her somewhat reclusive demeanor and intensely eclectic work makes her difficult to pin down but endlessly interesting in the same instance. Trockel’s current retrospective at the New Museum, ‘Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos’, features work from a selection of other artists, artifacts from natural history museums, and of course some of her own highlights. All of this enmeshed makes for a provocative alchemy. Check out some of our favorites below!Rosemarie Trockel ‘Prime-Age’. 2012The diversity and playfulness of the exhibition is well summarized by Roberta Smith when she says: ‘In “Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” she seems to blow art history apart, to make it porous and open-ended, fomenting a bigger, wilder history that ranges beyond traditional art on several fronts, including science and nature. At least that seems to be what’s happening in the mix of objects and images by Ms. Trockel and others that she has orchestrated at the New Museum in collaboration with Lynne Cooke, former chief curator and deputy director at theMuseo Reina Sofía in Madrid, where this exhibition was mounted last summer. It includes works by imposing outsider artists like Morton Bartlett, James Castle andJudith Scott, along with early-18th-century botanical illustrations by Maria Sibylla Merian; exacting late-19th-century glass models of invertebrate sea life, by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka; and quite a bit more.’

Bonfire of the Vanities

Rachel Haidu on Rosemarie Trockel at the New Museum, New York

The massive formal and conceptual statements comprising recent blockbuster monographic exhibitions often aim to overtake institutions, with the underlying desire of strong-arming viewers into remembering the artist as a household name.

But what would it mean to oppose this trend – to sacrifice the sovereignty of the artist-brand and risk the high visitor stats that come with a marquee, must-see show? Portraying Rosemarie Trockel’s practice via a cosmology of more or less related artworks as well as non-art objects, curator Lynne Cooke cast the artist’s survey into unforeseen territory: Most of the work in fact derived from the past few years, rather than the years in which Trockel made a name for herself, serving to prevent its easy ascription to one prevailing interpretive framework.

Perhaps the days of the artist’s retrospective, with its glistening highlights and historicizing tail-end view, are numbered. After a decade or two of another kind of monographic exhibition – in which the artist takes over an institutional space, in either a supra-architectural or meta-performance blockbuster – we are now seeing curators undertake a kind of post-monographic practice of their own. Not by doing the artist’s work (as some have complained), but by actually rethinking the curatorial mandate, refusing to let the stakes of the monographic exhibit fall so readily into predetermined categories and value structures. How might a monographic exhibition disperse the artist’s identity in a way that is commensurate (if not at all identical) to the impulses behind artists’ collectives or even the way that historical work, included in contemporary art biennials, shifts our understandings of the present and the past? How might a curator even mine the lines between “professional” artists and whatever their opposite is, between craft and whatever its opposite is, between the binaries that continue to power the markets and other institutions? What could be made of – not just elided by – massive historical and geographic shifts between artists?

Any recent account of how exhibitions might undertake these challenges would have to start with discussions of metaphors like the one advertised in the title of “Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos”. If the notion of the “cosmos” suggests an orderly universe without any real gravitational center, then curator Lynne Cooke has ingeniously reconceived how a monographic art exhibit might behave “cosmologically”, displacing the ordinary pulls toward a singular center with new kinds of relationships that remain fundamentally mysterious. Given the cosmological precept of a unity of time and space – their interweaving into a fabric that bends between points that are both geographic and temporal – and its own apparent desire to move away from the purely monographic, “Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” cannot rest easily on contextualization, intimations of influence, or even such academic commonplaces as the “period eye” (Michael Baxandall), though it brings together works by disparate artists in ways that suggest, as in a “real” cosmos, multiple centers, gravitational pulls, and weights. In place of familiar modes of relating one artist or artwork to another (or to history), we have in this exhibition intimations of cosmological darkness – the black night sky echoed on the cover of the accompanying catalogue and on the dark walls of one of its central rooms, on the bottom floor, where indeed the majority of the other artists shown in this post-retrospective join Trockel. Promotional materials describe the “small, tiled room reminiscent of a Wunderkammer” (which actually overturned that cliché with its audio accompaniment to caged mechanical birds and an upside-down Broodthaersian palm tree hanging from the ceiling) as the show’s “epicenter.” But my experience was that, whereas the tiled white room was so celestially bright it was hard to stay in it for very long, the rest of that dark and cavernous floor was the show’s real tour de force.

Yet that was not where the bulk of Trockel’s work, nor the works that gained her a “reputation”, could be seen. The museum’s third and fourth floors held works using wool on or in the place of canvas, as well as freestanding objects, videos, books, and glazed ceramic sculptures. But not only did Cooke avoid giving us any of the “greatest hits” of Trockel’s work from the 1980s, she stayed almost entirely within the artist’s ­production of the past few years. Drawing our attention to and then keeping it well past the arc that canonizes artists’ early work only to conveniently drop them off the map of visibility, Cooke gives us such a concentrated focus on Trockel’s present work that she performatively invalidates such sell-by dates. Only a handful of works – for instance, “My Dear Colleagues” (1986), a sculpture bearing the eponymous phrase inked onto a plastic mold of a torso of indeterminate gender, with knitted sleeves – and a host of books refer us to the period in which Trockel came into international renown, the period that might have represented her career, until this show and with the exception of her intermittent gallery shows.

Of course that’s not the only way that Cooke rewrites the concept of the monographic show with this cosmos. On the third floor she surrounded and interrupted Trockel’s new works that use wool on canvas with works by Judith Scott, who wrapped ordinary objects in multicolored yarns so obsessively that they take on the uncanny shapes of small, domestic monsters (fabricated from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, these works are all untitled). As underscored by the Perspex frames that Trockel often places over the knitted or laid-wool canvases in her recent works, yarn defeats the “surfaceness” of the canvas’s two-dimensionality, absorbs our gaze in the manner of a dark color (most of the wool works shown were in hauntingly dark blacks and blues), and encourages us to perform a kind of up-close looking. These sculptural qualities took on a new dimension next to Scott’s works, with their far more immediate pleasures. But perhaps most interesting is the confrontation between the kind of canonical feminist challenge once emblemized by Trockel’s works in wool and the singularity of Scott’s story – that of a woman with Down Syndrome who was also deaf and mute, and who only began making these objects in her middle age in the supportive environment of a facility for the disabled. If such brief sketches of Scott’s life story redirect and also perpetuate feminist concerns with the body, with identity, and with confinement and institutional invisibility, it reframes not only Trockel’s “classic” works but also the currency of her present efforts. Issues such as domesticity and labor, implied not only in many of her materials, processes, and thematic concerns, are subsumed in a kind of suspended temporality suggested by Scott’s works, which testify to a truly other way of being. Thereby jolted from the congealed discourses on feminism’s “waves”, Trockel’s recent works also offer remarkable formal interest that complement and complicate such politicizations.

On the fourth floor, we found Trockel’s ceramic objects and books, including some oversized ceramic monuments – a massive white sofa draped in plastic and paint and yarn, another white plinth wearing a black shroud – that seem to both invite and refuse traditions of rethinking domesticity, including those of the Bauhaus and post-Bauhaus variety. Are these Post-Minimal in the Richard Artschwager-Tom Burr lineage? Such incorporation seems anathema not only to Trockel’s work, but also to Cooke’s vision of it. For, in a cosmos, Trockel is far more likely to bump up against – or fall into a circuit with – an “outsider” artist such as Scott or someone from an entirely other time-space. One wall running along the staircase leading to the fourth floor contained several monitors showing the remarkable 1912 films of Wladyslaw Starewicz that use beetle carcasses to enact familiar early film melodramas on a new scale. Thus Starewicz – like two other artists in the show, Salvador Dalí (not included in New York but on view when the exhibition was presented in Madrid’s Reina Sofía) and Ruth Francken – shared Trockel’s apparent belief that melodrama and scale need to be thought in relation to one another. Thanks to these disparate planets that now catch Trockel in their orbits, we can understand her interest in scale according to the psychosexual manias they make explicit. A new postwar Surrealist thread emerges, altogether extinguished in Joseph Beuys’s and Georg Baselitz’s heroicizing – or even the hermaphroditic figuration of Louise Bourgeois. If it seems most sympathetic to the oversized scale of Annette Messager’s collections and weavings, even such a “canonical” relation becomes, in the Trockel/Cooke version, less academic, loosened into another sense of history altogether.

On the museum’s second floor is where we found Trockel’s more “private” works, something like a collection of her favorite prints as well as companions made by a host of artists who are likely to be first-time discoveries for almost all audiences: Günter Weseler, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Mary Delany, Maria Sibylla Merian, Manuel Montalvo, José Celestino Mutis. Those who are perhaps familiar – James Castle, John James Audubon, Morton Bartlett, and the aforementioned Dalí and Francken – are only marginally more so: We might know their names or importance or even their work, but that doesn’t mean we have understood their work as contemporary art (only in Castle’s case can one unequivocally say that this has taken place – thanks again to efforts by Cooke and others [1] ). Here the professionalism of art is subdivided, with model-making and illustration sharing space and overlapping with obsessive taxonomies. We begin to see, perhaps, a world in which categories (of the Blaschkas’ jellyfishes, of the pitchers and wine glasses, parrots, and phone numbers of Montalvo’s handmade notebooks, of Merian’s insects and Bartlett’s ballerinas) generate ideas about what art can be and vice versa. But more powerfully, art in “Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” is tasked with generating new thought about categories – thought located in both labor and its apparent others (domesticity, natural life). In so doing, art becomes a stake without precise definition. There may be no better use for the monographic format than its auto-destruction, but if there’s going to be a bonfire, let it look like this.

“Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos”, New Museum, New York, October 24, 2012–January 20, 2013.

Note

“James Castle: Show and Store” (Reina Sofia, May 18–September 2011) was also curated by Cooke.

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Rosemarie TrockelJosefina Ayerza

The wicked witch appeared and warned the princess dear, ‘beware the rose, for when it pricks, you’ll sleep a hundred year.’ ‘The evil spell,’ a fairy cried, ‘just might not have to be! A handsome prince – if brave and true – can kiss and set you free.’

Rosemarie Trockel’s Sleeping Beauty right away raises the case as to esthetical parities concerning the famous fairy tale’s belated images. Again, what other referent is there than the signifier provided you take on its meaning? Now you look quietly into the image, the questions crowding, but a head… swollen, asleep, dead… dying? And is it at all the head of a woman? Chances are your reflection upon the image won’t fit the formal truth. And what this attests to is that Sleeping Beauty is not a signifier, but a name, indeed a spectre. The meaning it brings forth sets up the real. Legacy, or the surplus subtracted from the legend, lurks in the spectre. When it verges on delusion it is because the name’s place is void, kept void, celebrated as void. A rigid designator, it ascribes to the unmovable, it is not displaceable. Say you proclaim the Sleeping Beauty is a Mafioso, a passed out bum, a dead corpse, he will still be Sleeping Beauty however you describe him. Again, the singular topic, forever split between a story and a void, is not designated to reach its object. Its deeds lining up with melodrama, you recognize reality in fictional texts because that’s where you come from.

There was one oddball, yet the many look-alikes. A pale fellow crested with a profusion of dark, wavy hair – you surmise his complexion is almost white by virtue of rice powder; that his lips, not necessarily colored, are nevertheless painted; that his eyes and eyebrows, emphasized with kohl and mascara, hide things… that the nose, too perfect, is fictitious, and also the ears – and he could be suffering though he’s also smiling, vacillatingly, as if it all were a joke. A distraught audience has fingered him as multiple, claimed that he may not have been him – the One – whatever it takes to make him an Other getting only worse. Again you surmise, joyful music, glittering candelabra, luxurious costumes, charisma, diamonds and dazzle… the Persian Room in New York’s Plaza Hotel, the honky-tonk pianist in the movie South Sea Sinner with Shelley Winters, the Madison Square Garden, the Radio City Music Hall… and since Mr. Showmanship has no particular history, the figure in the portrait, thus the argument goes, must be Wladziu (Polish for Walter) Valentino Liberace. And it also is the many Liberaces – his famous chauffeurs – following Liberace’s will to reproduce himself, outside himself, in other people’s flesh, identical. The nature and dynamics of the operation are the domain of the character’s myth, which also tells you how Liberace, a maverick of cloning, used human beings to extract himself from others, to be in the Other flesh. Trockel’s drawing retains the label Untitled on behalf of profusive metonymy, or the many speculations… not so much from the One over to an Other, but from the Other over to the One.

An asleep, inert baby, a target mark over his chest… The Misfortune. A 1991 interview with Meyer Vaisman comes to mind; on the occasion Vaisman told of the popular festivals in his native country. Thus, in Venezuela, when a baby dies they proceed to boil him, and then they dress him in white and paint him as an angel. In addition the baby gets paper wings and is then set on a table. With people dancing and feasting, around the table the infant represents a newcomer in heaven. When the party concludes they hang the baby on a hook over the front door, so everybody can see that there is a new name in heaven. Angels, said Vaisman, are always children… Thus ensued the different sort of angels in my mind, specially the ones consisting of a head and a pair of wings, those that have certainly being equated to signifiers, and yes, they fly. With Trockel the names in heaven mark the body of the baby by cutting around the heart. And the invisible stigmata is resolved only when the desperate search for meaning yields to the agency of the signifier – whose misfortune is it?

An inert Young Man Dozing, it was past twelve o’clock when he awoke. The sun flowing in through the curtains of the room, rays of light bathed his face, arms, and torso. In the dream he was a butterfly. Now he says to himself – it’s only a dream. Again, still pondering over the fancy, he comes to ask himself whether it is the butterfly who dreams he – the butterfly – is Choang-tsu…

He is not mad, first because Choang-tsu doesn’t regard himself as absolutely identical with Choang-tsu, and secondly because he does not fully understand how right he is. Why is he so right? According to Jacques Lacan when he was the butterfly that he apprehended one of the roots of his identity – that he was and is, in his essence that butterfly who paints himself with his own colors – and it is because of this that, in the last resort, he is Choang-tsu. Because of the nature of dreams it’s not likely that while he is the butterfly he would start wondering whether, when he is Choang-tsu awake, he is not the butterfly he is dreaming of being. Now he dreams of being the butterfly, now he wakes up and wants to tell the story. Not that he represented himself as a butterfly, he was a butterfly. This does not mean he is bewitched by the butterfly – he is a witch butterfly, yet spelled by no one, for in the dream he is a butterfly for nobody. It is when he is awake that he is Choang-tsu for others – entrapped in their butterfly net.

Auratic Cabinet of Curiosities
Rosemarie Trockel’s Art Cosmos at the New MuseumRosemarie Trockel’s oeuvre defies all categorization. The important German contemporary artist works with every conceivable medium and style. Numerous works on paper by the artist are in the Deutsche Bank Collection, and she created an exclusive edition for the bank in 1993. Her knitted work Who will be in in ’99? has been on view in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt on permanent loan from the Collection since 2011. Now, the New Museum in New York presents a show of her work that resembles a cabinet of curiosities. Trockel’s retrospective combines her work with the objects, personalities, and works of art that inspire her. Cheryl Kaplan on one of the exhibition highlights of recent years.

A short man with whiskey flasks strapped to his legs like holsters has two black plumes sticking out of his head. He looks like some wacko bandit or 17th-century French grenadier stuck in a glass cage, staring at a row of decoy ducks and fake pistols. Just another day at the New Museum? Hardly. Rosemarie Trockel is in town, and she hasn’t come alone — she’s brought an entire universe with her of works and things that define her world. And if the title of this bandit is any clue, we might just have to “Kiss [Her] Aura.”From the get-go, curator Lynne Cooke knew that a “standard retrospective wouldn’t be of much interest to the artist.” Why would it be? Trockel has spent the last 30 years like a rogue operative in the art world: as soon as she’s been identified with one signature style, she drops it. Think about her knit paintings in the ’80s, a genre Trockel invented that used wool instead of canvas. This work propelled the artist to international stardom, emerging as she did from Cologne, then the epicenter of one of the most important art scenes in post-War Europe and the world. Trockel’s now iconic series of multiple knit ski masks and leggings used industrial machines to create patterns ranging from a Playboy bunny logo to swastikas and a hammer and sickle. While it used the very methodology that had confined women for centuries, handicraft such as knitting and sewing, to drive home a political and social point, it also perplexed the public with its unwillingness to stick to one art historical genre, such as Feminism, Modernism, or Minimalism. Just as Trockel hit her stride, she went headlong into a new identity as filmmaker, then sculptor, painter, and book-maker.For most of her career, the artist has been accused by critics of being enigmatic, evasive, or elusive in exhibitions such as the recent documenta, or earlier at the 1999 Biennale di Venezia, where she represented Germany. Trockel may be the ultimate trickster, but her latest and most significant contribution to the art world, on view in New York, is likely to stop you in your tracks. Rosemarie Trockel: A Comos is a stunning and disturbing exhibition that began in Madrid at the Reina Sofia and travels next to the Serpentine in London before concluding at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn.Riddled with misfits and outcasts, beauty and violence, bawdy humor and a “peculiar realism,” as Cooke puts it, the show is a Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities: “a forerunner of the museum as we know it in the West.” Though Trockel is at the fulcrum of the show, it also includes work by fourteen other artists coming from several countries, centuries, and disciplines including natural history, fashion, and art. The beautifully vivid flora and fauna drawings by the 17th-century naturalist and illustrator, Maria Sibylla Merian — “likely the first person to go anywhere on a purely scientific exploration at the time” — stand opposite Trockel’s own weirdo memento mori case titled Picnic, 2012 on the second floor that contains a rotting hand, some dead flowers, and twigs. There are also breathtakingly detailed glass replicas of sea anemones, jellyfish and other invertebrate sea life by the 19th-century father/son duo of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, first created for the Harvard Botanical Museum and natural history museums worldwide. These objects, models, and artifacts require time to observe, significantly slowing down the usual breakneck pace at which we view contemporary art.But it’s the harsh, cold neon light oozing out of the entrance and exit to a small, white tiled room nearly hidden from view in an otherwise dark-walled expanse on the second floor that feels the most peculiar. The room is disquieting; it has the look and feel of an interrogation chamber or a butcher shop (according to Trockel), or a mad laboratory. An upside-down fake palm tree hangs from the ceiling. Next to it, a tarantula, that large hairy American spider, sits on top of a woman’s pubic hair like a codpiece or toupee. This bawdy digital print, called Replace Me, 2011, is Trockel’s version of Gustave Courbet’s famously scandalous painting, Origin of the World, 1866. In using the tarantula, Trockel not only opts for rude double entendres, but invites purposeful ambiguity that not only references the genitals as the place where the spinning of the world starts, but the classic male accusation of women as vicious spinners of tales or gossips.As Cooke sees it: “In some ways, the white ceramic tile room is the heart of the show: things radiate out from there chronologically and conceptually. We had what we can say in retrospect were two lynchpins for the show related to Natural History (botany and zoology) and an interest in maverick figures who were either outsiders or less recognized artists. In some ways, we built around that.” Cooke continues: “We didn’t ever sit back and analyze the project, it was done in the way Rosemarie usually works: by trial and error… I proposed that Rosemarie think about a cosmos — an imaginary universe of things she felt strongly about or that made a picture of an imaginary world she identified with. Obviously that was very open-ended.”While other exhibitions have used the Wunderkammer as a thematic foothold — for instance Andy Warhol’s 1969 RISD Museum show Raid the Icebox, where he raided the museum’s basement to display bins of 18th-century shoes, unknown paintings from the 1920s, and contemporary oddities, or MoMA’s 2008 show Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities that included prints and book art by Louise Bourgeois, Damien Hirst, Otto Dix, and James Ensor. Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub, a text work by Lawrence Weiner, ancient Afghan princess sculptures: even the “brain” of the last documenta, in which curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev brought together a wide range of epochs and movements in a cabinet of curiosities, shows how popular art historical references are on the current scene.Rarely, however, has the Wunderkammer gone beyond its original concept as a collection of curiosities to challenge and reanimate contemporary art. What we see in A Cosmos is not just Trockel’s “trial and error” sampling system, but a project aimed at revamping the very act of how we see art in a museum. Is A Cosmos a new prototype to stop that time-honored search for the next best, hottest, youngest, outrageous artist? Let’s hope so, even if we don’t know what to call this phenomenon. Cooke says: “It’s the porousness between the fine arts and the applied arts or the fine arts and craft that’s of interest in order to make a sharper critique and at the same time a playful one.”Museum chief curator Massimiliano Gioni has called A Cosmos “an autobiography in images.” But this exhibition is not simply a compilation of odd-ball objects and artifacts organized to express Trockel’s personal mythologies, strange as they are in works like Fly Me to the Moon, 2012, Trockel’s first collaboration with German artist Gunter Weseler. Here, a baby with a fly on its cheek is swaddled in a Snoopy dog astronaut outfit in a string net crib. A very surreal-looking black, white, and grey stuffed animal is tucked next to the baby’s chin, surreptitiously inflating and deflating, causing this cute furry blob to breathe on its own and make us jump mid-air. A phantom lullaby drifts in and out of the second floor. It’s not clear where the sound is coming from, because there’s no mobile hanging over the bassinet, just an empty hook (poor baby).

At times, Trockel’s show is like a fairground showcasing outsiders, for instance the Idaho-born deaf/mute artist James Castle and his decoy ducks, or Judith Scott, also deaf and born with Down Syndrome, and her obsessively wrapped yarn objects. There are also exotic attractions, like Cedric, a gigantic lobster caught and cooked in 1964, on view in New York as the understudy to Salvador Dali’s surreal Aphrodisiac Telephone, 1936. Dali’s phone used a lobster body as the receiver and was seen in the Madrid exhibition. In Lucky Devil, 2012, a crab lays prone on a stack of wool remnants that are actually the original industrially knit works that brought Trockel early fame. There are also three paintings by Tilda, an orangutan whose lyrical abstract canvases Trockel has collected.

The 1912 stop-action animation The Cameraman’s Revenge is Wladyslaw Starewicz’s super-surreal and morbidly charming love fest of two beetles and a grasshopper dashing in out of hotels and after-hours clubs, escaping up chimneys, having knock-down, drag-out fights, only to fall back into each others’ arms (or claws?). Trockel frequently features animals in her work. With Carsten Höller, Trockel created a House for Pigs and People for documenta X. (Höller once described the project as “a monument of incomprehensibility.”) So don’t bother placing any art historical harnesses on Trockel. She’ll defy them every time.

The third floor suddenly shifts to Modernism, housing mostly wool hand-knit paintings. These largely blue monochromatic works, such as Sky, 2012 and Kind of Blue, 2012 are reminiscent of Malevich or Yves Klein. But other work in wool riffs Agnes Martin’s minimalist paintings. Cooke observes: “The monochrome is the quintessential abstract format of 20th-century painting with all its aspirations, as in Malevich or Mondrian, where it became transcendental. Trockel’s big wool paintings deliberately avoid the natural heroics that scale often implies. They’re amusing and wry. They’re made with thick wool, as though for a very cold climate. The paintings have these slightly tacky-looking borders that are gorgeous and funny.”

Trockel’s works in the Deutsche Bank Collection are good examples of the artist’s early interest in embracing and upending Modernism, mastering and mimicking its form in order to create her own idiosyncratic language. Her 1988 knitted picture Who will be in in 99? is on view in the Städel Museum’s new annex, where it hovers above the main hall, hung in a corner like a Russian icon in an homage to Malevich’s Black Square. On the silk scarf Trockel made in 1993 as an edition for the Deutsche Bank Collection are her own Schizo Pullovers with their dual neck holes as well as geometric forms typical for Constructivist art. The edition’s color scheme, reduced to black, white, and red, also frames a reference to the Russian avant-garde.

The fourth floor presents book drafts using the formal language of Constructivism, as well as Trockel’s quirky and beautifully awkward ceramics. The ceramics are like live mutations with an eerie, anthropomorphic vibrancy. Cooke reveals: “Trockel literally throws clay onto a surface to get these strange aquatic structures that are like coral or sea creatures, while other ceramics are strictly formed and tabulated casts of meat organized into a grid. Her world is made up of this movement between order and disorder.”

Trockel’s not only raided the icebox, she’s also filled it back up with worlds immense and trivial, tragic and humorous, sacred and perverse, colliding the real and the surreal. Her misfits and outcasts offer a peculiar realism that might just teach us how to see or at least recognize one of the most unique auras we’ve come across in a long time.